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The tutorials just get better on PHLearn. Forget about stressing when cutting the hair of your subject out. Just use channels to make the process a whole lot easier. Thanks Aaron Nace!! I will be alot more confident when cutting out subjects and replacing backgrounds.
PHLEARN Photoshop Compositing: Masking and Cutting Out Subjects
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Welcome back to 30 days of Photoshop Today I'm gonna show you how to cut out hair Hey there welcome to phlearn My name is Aaron NACE You can find me on phlearn comm where we make learning fun today's episode we're tackling one of the most difficult things to cut out from this background and that is hair now in yesterday's episode we showed you how to cut out just about anything so Like let's say you want to cut a person out of the background you would want to use the pen tool for the majority of the person and then use the technique I'm going to show you today for their hair so using those two combined and you can cut out anything from its background so here's our image for today I specifically chose an image that was a little bit more difficult because if you just have a subject with like you know very little detail in their hair and They're on a pure white background honestly that's pretty easy but here you can see our subject has a lot of detail in his hair the background is relatively complex now if you want to follow along with this tutorial you can actually download this sample image just follow the link right down below and you get the PSD as well which is super nice so the first thing that we're going to do is select our subject now I'm using the latest version of Photoshop is CC 2020 and with this addition, they've added a select subject which I think is fantastic so if you go to select and down to subject boom it's gonna figure out what the subject of your image is and turn them into a selection how amazing is that now it's not perfect, okay we can see it didn't get this little speed light here exactly how we wanted and it didn't get this area here but that's okay we can go in here with like the Lasso tool and clean this up so let's go to our lasso tool I'm gonna hold shift there we go that's gonna allow me to add this lasso and then hold alt or option and then I can create very easily polygonal lessons oops so we're adding to that and then this selected a little bit too much so I'm gonna hold alt or option which will - from a selection okay and we're gonna go ahead and select this out here now I'm not trying to be incredibly accurate in this case this The tutorial is about the hair so I'm not you know not trying to get these other areas perfect but we'll get them decent again If you want perfect over these areas I recommend using the pen tool and yesterday's episode showed you how to do that okay well that looks pretty dang good for now so let's go ahead and click on our boop layer mask icon and you can see our subject is cut out from the background but his hair doesn't look that great Right it needs a little bit of help I mean his hair looks fine the selection doesn't look that great and this is what we're gonna run into pretty frequently because hair is a lot of fine detail and a lot of these automatic selection tools don't work that well now there are so many different techniques for doing a great job cutting out here we have an entire pro tutorial on phlearn calm dedicated just cutting out here but the strategy that we're gonna use here Is incredibly simple and it will work a lot of the time so we're gonna use select and mask and the refine edge tool within the selected mask to figure out what is hair and what is background and alter the selection based on what we paint so go ahead and click on your layer mask and go up to select and then down to select and mask here we go now here in the selected mask of dialogue you have a few different views you can choose from so you can choose to have a View an onion skin where you see partial transparency marching ants I find this view here the overlay view to be pretty helpful because I just see my subject on a red background okay now you can also choose your opacity so if your image looks a little bit different from mine and these are basically to probably just your few options okay now we have a few tools here on the left-hand side we have tools like the quick selection tool which Basically allows you to add or remove from your selection right down below it we have the refine edge brush tool and this is really where the magic of selecting a mask comes in in my opinion the refine edge brush tool basically how this Tool Works is wherever you click so let's say I click here inside of the hair it's gonna start sampling the texture and the color from wherever I click and it's gonna say ok you must want that and as I click and draw out It's going to continue to look for that texture and color and refine my selection to lewd more areas with that texturing color so here's how we do it we click inside here and we just drag out a little bit and you don't have to do this over and over again I can just continue to paint right over here and it's gonna continue to discover areas that are similar to wherever I clicked originally okay and we're gonna come back up here You can see it's getting the hair area now I don't necessarily want to do this inside of my hairline because it can remove areas that are dissimilar to wherever you clicked originally which we usually don't want right but in this case, you can see there we go hair has a little bit of transparency we want to make sure we include that as well all right and we're just gonna kind of come and paint right around there to the very end And then what we let go it does a bit of figuring out it's like okay cool I think I know what I'm doing here let's figure everything out and make a selection based on that so at this point this looks pretty good you can see it's discovered a lot of the hair and we're ready to go so once it looks like this go ahead and say output you have a few different options remember we clicked on the layer mask to start with so it's gonna update the Actual layer mask layer mask looks good and we're just gonna go ahead and hit OK There we go and you can see it updated our layer mask so let's hold alt or option and click here on the layer mask and look how nice that is it's done a good job now if it's not perfect not a big deal let's hit B for the brush tool and we're gonna paint black and white on our layer mask but we're gonna make sure we change the mode of the Brush tool to overlay with your brush tool just set it to a normal mode that's what it looks like to paint black that's what it looks like to paint white and we know on a layer mask black will make it invisible white will make it visible so what we want to do is change this from normal down to overlay and now check out what it looks like when I paint black instead of filling in see I'm just gonna paint from here over here just like that you can see it's Protecting the lighter areas is okay so if you have an area like this where maybe I wanted to darken that up but not just totally paint block over these areas overlay is the way to go and if you paint white it's gonna protect your light areas as well okay so if you ever do change mode of your brush I highly highly highly suggest change again back before moving on because I can't tell you how many times I've gone back to use My brush tool like a day later and it just like isn't working and I'm like what's going on and then I realized the brush mode was set to overlay or something like that so just make sure you change your brush mode back to normal super important okay that looks fantastic now let's hold alt or option and click back on our layer mask and see what we've done so you can see we cleaned that area up and now our selection looks fantastic so let's go Ahead and grab a solid color fill layer we're just gonna go all the way to white and put this directly behind our subject and check that out our subject is let's hit F one more time for full screen our subject is cut out very well from his background all of the hair looks fantastic and we use just a couple simple tools to get there and that's all there is to cutting hair out of its background again if you have a more complicated situation or you want to Learn more methods for doing this because honestly there are a lot of different types of hair and a lot of different types of backgrounds You can click right up here to learn a little bit more We have a pro tutorial that goes super in-depth on cutting out hair thank you so much I hope you're enjoying 30 days of Photoshop we've got just a couple more days tomorrow we're gonna show you how to match a subject into the background we're gonna show you how to Analyze and rec color and light levels for compositing I'll phlearn you later See you tomorrow Bye everyone Tags:
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Today I'm going to show you how to use layer masks in Photoshop hey guys and welcome to phlearn my name is Aaron NACE and you can find me on phlearn dot-com where we make learning photoshop & photography fun and today's episode it's been a long time coming I was looking back at our old episodes and I realize after four and a half years of making Photoshop tutorials I haven't made an episode on how to use layer Masks which is one of the most basic things and one of the most important things you can learn in Photoshop so in today we're going to show you the ins and outs of layer masks now basically what is a layer mask it's a way to make a layer either visible or invisible you can paint black to make it invisible or paint white to make it visible and you can use these with regular layers with adjustment layers they're a non-destructive way to make part of your Image appear or disappear we got a bunch to get into let's go ahead and jump into Photoshop alright guys so here's our image for today we've got an awesome looking subject with all kinds of colors and we're gonna be cutting her out of the background we're also going to be adding some like nice dots and things like that to the image so to start off with let's go ahead and show you what a layer mask actually is and how to work with layer masks so we're going to Create a new layer so let's go ahead and click on our new layer icon you can see we have layer 0 which is our background here and layer 1 which is our new layer now what I'm going to do is we're going to grab our marquee tool we're going to go to an elliptical marquee and I'm going to hold the shift down and just make a circle just like that okay so I'm on a new layer we've got a selection active now there's nothing inside of this selection so what we're going to do Is we're going to fill this with a color so let's go to edit and down to fill okay it's going to go ahead and fill this you can choose to have it filled with a pattern foreground background color we're just going to go to color here and then we can actually choose a color so first we click on color and then we can choose our color and I can choose it here you know from my actual color picker or I can go over to my image and I've got a little eyedropper Now okay and let's click on this yellow so we're going to fill this circle with yellow so I hit OK there fill with yellow hit OK and there we go ctrl or command D to deselect alright so now we have this really nice circle on a new layer filled with yellow okay and you can see it's above my subject here we can move it anywhere we want to okay well let's go ahead and zoom in a little bit and start to show you guys how layer masks actually work So right now this is it's a hundred percent visible this area is on this layer now let's say if we wanted part of this circle to disappear traditionally you might think to use an eraser tool so I'm going to use the eraser tool here this is the destructive way of doing it by the way using an eraser tool I prefer to use a layer mask because the layer mask is non-destructive so again eraser destructive layer mask non-destructive okay so let's hit the eraser tool and We're just going to erase part of this away and say okay cool that's what I wanted to look like I don't want that area to be a be there I want to see through part of my circle there which is totally fine if that's exactly what you want and you never want to get anything back but now here's the problem let's say I want to get some of that erase some of that back right I want some of this information back from that circle well I've erased it away there's really Nothing I can do to get it back except for I can go back in my history so for instance if I go to window and down to history I can step backwards in time and I can go ahead and get that back but let's say you did a bunch of other cool stuff in the meantime you don't want to go and undo all your changes just to be able to get some of this back so let's go ahead and step back into our time so using the eraser tool that's a destructive way of making part of your Layer invisible now what we're going to do is click on a layer mask so you have a layer mask icon right down here okay you can also go to layer okay and right down here to layer mask and we can go to reveal all which just creates a white layer mask okay now here's the deal with layer masks if they're white it means the layer is going to be visible if they're black it means the layer is going to be invisible okay and you can use any type of Selection tools and techniques you have to either fill parts of a layer mask with white or black in this case we're just going to use a simple brush tool all right so jumping back in I'm gonna hit B for the brush tool now you can see my foreground color here is black so as I pay overtop of this circle there we go it's pretty similar to what we just saw with the eraser now here's our lair so We've got our lair I'm clicked on the lair you can see a little bounding box next to it here okay and click on the layer mask now we've got the bounding box next to the layer mask okay and you can see there's a little bit of black right here as well so painting with my brush tool if I paint black on my layer mask it makes it go away now as opposed to the eraser all I have to do is paint white on my layer mask and I can get this back so this is any point in time So I'm here working on my image ten years later I can open this up and if I had paint it black right there I can just click on my layer mask and paint white right here on this layer so that's the whole idea behind a layer mask it allows you to make part of a layer visible and part of a layer invisible and it's completely reversible you can change this from visible to invisible at any point in time so that's why it's non-destructive because it doesn't Actually destroy what's going on in your image and you can make parts of the layer visible and invisible all right guys so that's the basics now let's go ahead and jump in and show you a little bit more advanced ways to actually use layer masks okay so we started off by just using our brush tool we just painted some black on there now let's say we wanted our entire layer to be either visible or invisible well we can just fill this entire layer with either White or black so I'm going to hit shift delete which is the keyboard shortcut for the fill dialog okay and we can just say fill that with black and again it's filling my layer mask with black not my layer so let's hit OK and we can see the entire thing becomes invisible all right shift delete again and I'm going to say fill it with white and our entire layer becomes visible okay so now let's say I painted some areas here on my layer mask and I want To get a good idea of what I've actually painted well if you hold alt or option and click on your layer mask there we go it gives you a preview of what your actual layer mask looks like so alt or option you can click there again and it's going to go off and on okay so if you need to see what your layer mask actually looks like just hold alt or option and click on your layer mask okay if you want to select your layer mask simply hold down ctrl or command And click on your layer mask that's going to turn your layer mask into a selection so this is the brush stroke that I actually made there okay now if you want to temporarily disable your layer mask hold down the shift key and click on your layer mask you can see it puts a red X there and it just temporarily disables that so if you need to see what does this look like complete well there we go just hit shift and click back and forth on that okay and The last keyboard charcoal we're going to show you guys is the slash key it's right above your return key on your keyboard it looks like it looks like this it looks like a slash okay so if you're on your lair just click on that slash heap and this is basically going to give you a quick mask view of what your actual layer mask looks like okay and then to get that away just click on that slash key again so these are just basically a few different ways to Actually visualize your layer mask so up until now we've been using a layer mask to make a circle either visible or invisible and that's fine if you're just working with circles but layer masks are really helpful they go a lot more advanced than that so now let's go ahead and use a layer mask with a couple selection tools and we can do this actually cut our subject out of her background okay to start off with we're going to make our circle layer invisible Just going to click on this eye making it invisible real quick okay now we're going to use our magic wand tool basically using the magic wand tool I can select out this white area here on my subject and I've chosen this image because it's going to be relatively easy to cut our subject out because she's got a perfectly white background so let's go ahead and click on our layer okay we're going to use our magic wand tool and I'm just going to go ahead and click right Outside of our subject and you can see we've selected all of this area okay now we've got a couple more areas to select so I'm going to hold shift and we're going to click here there we go and we're going to click right down there as well okay so now all those areas are selected so now that we have those areas selected we can turn any active selection into a layer mask it's really easy to do simply click here on your layer mask icon okay and we can see Now we have a layer mask let's use that keyboard shortcut I told you about earlier alt or option this is what the layer mask looks like on our image so you can see all this area's white and this area is black now we know that black makes a layer invisible and white makes a layer visible okay so it makes sense if I hold alt or option and click on this right it makes sense that our background is visible and our subject is not now if you want to get if you Basically want to flip that just simply click on your layer mask and hit ctrl or command I as an invert and it's going to invert your layer mask so you can see let's hold alt or option I'm going to click here and now ctrl or command I there we go and you can just invert that back and forth okay and if you ever can't find anything within Photoshop make sure to use your help menu like I'm going to type in I'm going to click on help and I'm going to type in there we Go I am ve or T there we go and just by typing in invert now I can actually click here and I can see adjustments invert so it's going to it's going to actually highlight it I can click here and it will invert for me and it's going to highlight it here in my menu system as well so if I ever say anything and you're like oh I don't remember where that is just type it into your help menu and it'll actually show up there within Photoshop ok so now that that's inverted We can see that our subject is cut out of a background this the checkerboard here in the background lets you know that she is cut out so she's cut out of her background let's create a new layer and I'm going to put it under her so we're going to start off I'm going to go to layer we're getting a go to new fill layer and we're going to go to a solid color okay there we go and we're going to hit OK and it's going to ask us what color and I'm just going to choose a Nice bright yellow we can change this color at any point in time okay now we have our fill adjustment layer ok and we have our subject here I'm going to click here and drag that underneath our subject there we go and now we have our background of a completely new color now if we want to change the color of a fill layer at any time simply double click right here on layer itself okay and then you can use your eyedropper to simply hover over different parts of your image And you can choose what background in this case I think it's kind of fun to choose backgrounds from our actual image I'm going to choose this very light yellow all right that's it okay there all right now we've seen that layer masks work with regular layers like here a layer with my subject but layer masks also work with any adjustment layers or fill layers as well okay so for instance if I click on the layer mask here for my fill layer and I Make a selection right around here there we go hit shift delete and I can fill that with black there we go now it's completely invisible in that area I'm just going to do that a couple more times we're just going to fill a couple of these little holes with back all right there we go I'm using my keyboard shortcuts to just save a little bit of time here alright so these are all holes basically now if I wanted to create Another color behind here really easy to do just create an adjustment layer we're going to go to solid color just like we did earlier in our menu system okay now we're going to choose a nice red and we're going to pop that right behind our subject and our color here we can simply double click here and we can choose a color from our actual image all right let's hit OK so we can see layer masks are really helpful in this case a layer mask is allowing us to cut our subject Out of her background in this light case our layer mask is putting holes in this layer which is allowing us to see through to the layer underneath it there we go and that those are basically filling up the holes okay and on the very top we have this other circle here that's kind of taking up a little bit more space and let's say we wanted to kind of use a smaller section of this well we could just use our marquee tool there we go make a selection right Around here and on our layer mask we can simply hit ctrl or command I to invert that okay or we can fill that with white or black and then we can see now we've got a hole here in our actual layer mask so we've got some kind of fun there I'm going to hit ctrl or command J to duplicate this and we'll just make a really simple like kind of fun graphic on our background all right so I'm again mostly just like trying to show you guys how to use the layer mask here but why Not create a fun graphic while we're at it Wow learn you're so good at creating fun graphics on the fly Thanks all right so there we can see we have a few duplicates of our layer each of those has a layer mask which is making all of the original circles have holes in them all right I'm going to go ahead and click on all these layers shift-click on all them and hit ctrl or command G to group them together so we Can click those on or off okay and that's the basic idea with layer masks so basically makes a layer either visible or invisible you can use it on any layer and if it is invisible then basically you're going to see what's underneath that layer so if you want to cut your subject out of your background we've got many great free episodes on doing that you can click on your screen right now and get to some of our episodes on cutting your subject out of The background and then you can put behind whatever background you'd like in Photoshop the last thing we're going to show you is how to duplicate your layer masks so you can use the same layer mask on multiple layers and how to use layer masks in a group so let's go to our subject here we have our subject cut out of our background now let's say we have a new layer here I'm just going to again we're going to create a new solid color fill layer alright we'll just choose Like a nice bright pink here hit OK I'm going to place this behind our subject so we have our subject in the bright pink now let's say I want to use the exact same layer mask that's on my subject so I have my subject here here's our layer mask hold alt or option to view your layer mask to duplicate layer mask from one layer to another simply hold alt or option and then click and drag so we're going to click here and drag down we're going to see a double Arrow okay a little preview of the layer mask and when I look let go it's going to copy the exact same layer mask from this layer over to this layer okay and now I can simply move this layer over to the right giving me kind of like an interesting type shadow effect alright let's go ahead and change our color we're going to choose this yellow and then maybe just a little bit there we go kind of like echo it out a little bit just a little bit more fun there so We're using the exact same layer mask on this layer and on this layer we've just simply moved it out a little bit and you can use that technique to create things like shadows in Photoshop we have a couple of layers here on our background okay so we have this layer okay which is basically just this yellow background and then we have our the spots underneath it so if I wanted to shift-click both of those layers and hit controller command G to group them Together okay now we have both of those layers we can actually use layer masks on groups so you can use the layer mask on individual layers or on adjustment layers or on entire groups so now that we have our group here let's go ahead and click on our layer mask icon okay and I'm going to hit G this is for my gradient so G for the gradient tool we're going to use a linear gradient okay I'm going to use the foreground transparent so click on your gradient Editor go to foreground to transparent here and we're going to paint it with black so here you see a little preview it's going to go black to transparent okay and I'm going to start here on the right and simply fade to the left there we go and now we see our layer mask or our background is basically fading from invisible to visible and then I can create a new solid color adjustment layer behind that and then we can see let's just turn this layer off for a Second we can see kind of the idea there this is fading from invisible here visible there and then we have another layer kind of underneath that and so that's defining the entire group now as you're working in Photoshop you can always hold shift click on your layer mask and decide do I like this visible or not visible do I want this visible or not visible you can click on your layer masks at any point in time and enable them and disable them it makes working With layer masks really easy alright guys and that's basically the entire idea behind layer masks in Photoshop if you want to use a layer mask and I highly suggest using them because they're incredibly helpful on a use them in every single image hide edit in Photoshop just follow these key steps remember you can use a layer on any layer including groups so to create a layer mask simply go to layer down to layer mask and go to reveal all this is Going to make a white layer mask making everything visible if you want any part of your layer to be invisible you can simply paint black on it using a brush tool or a clone stamp tool marquee tool' you can fill it with colors you can use the gradient tool basically any way you can get black on your layer mask that's going to make a certain part of your layer invisible so remember white is visible black is invisible there are a few keyboard Shortcuts that also help when using a layer mask you can hold the shift key down and click on your layer mask which holds a big red X over the layer mask making it temporarily invisible so if you want to see what the original layer looks like just hold shift click on and off from that layer mask if you want to see a preview of what your actual layer mask looks like hold alt or option and click on the layer mask it's going to give you a black and white preview of That layer mask and you can turn a layer mask into a selection by holding ctrl or command and clicking on that layer mask the last keyboard shortcut is holding down the slash key right above the return key on your keyboard it gives you a quick mask preview of what your layer mask actually looks like to copy a layer mask from one layer to another hold alt or option + click and drag from one layer to another and to add a layer mask to a group simply group multiple layers Together click on the layer mask icon right on the bottom of your layers panel or go to layer down to layer mask in to reveal all and that's all there is to it guys layer masks are one of the most important things you can use in Photoshop because they're a non-destructive way of making layers invisible allowing you to do things like cut your subject out of the background create really nice gradients and fun Shapes in Photoshop if you love Photoshop as much as I you go ahead and click on your screen right about now we'll send you free photoshop & photography episodes every single week and if you have an idea for an episode or a question comment about today's episode just leave it in the comment box right down below I'd love to hear from you thanks so much guys i'll phlearn you later bye everyone alright okay it's a layer down to play your mask and Then to refuel that's it guys you 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